Community Update – January 2015

Welcome to the new year! The year of neotopia! This is our 1st community update of 2015! We hope you made it through the holidays well and are having a wonderful 2015 so far. This update is to inform you of the changes the community will undergo and what to expect in the very near future. Our community is growing everyday! We have just hit 800 registered
members on our forums, and over 600+ Twitter followers. Thank you! We are grateful for your support and working hard everyday to honor that support.

As you may have read in UncleSpun’s blog, we are in need of moderators for our forums – our temporary home. Our 3 original moderators are no longer with us. In every new endeavor there will be areas where improvement is needed and a learning curve is expected. To help facilitate this, we will be increasing the amount of communication with the new mods. We have completed a moderation selection process before with mixed reactions. We are learning from the missteps of the previous selection process in order to make this as smooth of a transition as possible this time.

For our forums we are looking for 3 moderators – they will be determined as 1 selected and 2 voted in by the community. We heard the community’s feedback from last time with some community members saying they were not happy that mods were voted in. We took that into consideration and that is one of the reasons we have decided to bring on 1 mod without voting, based solely on their history with the PS Home community and merit. We take all opinions, comments, criticism and praise into account and learn from the past when making decisions that affect the current and future neotopia. We have decided that we will hold the selection process in the manner described below over a 2 week period to gather a pool of candidates for the community to then vote on:

1) As we need someone to step in quickly and ideally want someone on the mod team with lots of previous forum experience, we have reached out to someone we know – a well respected community member, a long time Home user and Guide. This member has selflessly helped the PS Home community, spent years in PS Home helping answer questions on the forums and helping people in world with everything from reward tasks, space tours, games and helping host events. This community member also helped the madmunki developers and Spunland community by writing the 1st comprehensive guide to Spunland. Please join me in congratulating and welcoming our new neotopia community moderator, LegoFire!

2) For those of you who would like to be a neotopia moderator, be warned it can be a thankless job. You may have to moderate friends, which can cause hard feelings and sadly, in some cases, the loss of friendships. This is sad and we wish it was not the case, but we do want everyone who steps forward to be aware that this is always a possibility. It takes a certain kind of personality to be a moderator, and a certain skill set to be a good moderator. We want the community to be aware of what is expected of neotopia moderators, because we see neotopia moderators differently than most communities see their moderators. We see our mods as guides first and foremost, active members of the community, calm with a pleasant demeanor and are able to set their personal beliefs, ideologies and bias aside during all moderation. We believe very deeply that the community has a right to reasonable freedom of speech. This does not mean the community can speak obscenely on the community’s forum, but does mean community members have a right to their own views and beliefs. As long as they stay in the guidelines provided by our forum rules, then moderation should be used as sparingly as possible and conversations with individual users should be employed to overcome issues privately.

In the near future we will be putting more of the plans and options for neotopia before the community and we will be relying on the mods to help keep debate lively and constructive. What previously were hypothetical ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’ threads, will become, this is what we are planning to do and have the communities consensus on.

3) We will hold a proper vetting process over a 2 week period of time for the whole community (new members and vets) on our forums to get an idea of how this set of candidates would handle themselves. This will not only let the community know who they are voting for, but add a layer of transparency to the process. We will be asking for specific information and a brief summary of why you think you would be a good moderator. We will also need to know timezones and availability because they are key factors in running a 24 hour team.

4) We will be posting a thread entitled – ‘neotopia Moderator Position Sign Up Thread – Step 1…‘. If you would like to become a neotopia moderator, please post there explaining why you think you would be a good fit (and what time zone you are in). This thread will be open for 7 days to make sure that there is enough time for people to nominate themselves and only
***themselves***. Once the thread closes, we will then – over the course of a week – post a number of threads asking theoretical situations you may have to deal with and we would invite everyone who has put themselves forwards to post their answers in these threads. At the end of that week, we will then take a selection of those who have volunteered and post a thread for people to vote on their preferred choice of moderator.

There will be more details to share going forward. We will keep you informed as the moderation selection process begins and keep the community at the heart of this process. We will have more information regarding the progress of neotopia itself soon! ( maybe even some pics) Keep an eye on UncleSpun’s blog for that news!

Thank you everyone for your time and I look forward to seeing you on the forums soon!

4 Comments

Thank you for your concern, Ending Demise but the word choice is correct. Good looking out though =^) Vet when used as a verb has the following meanings, according to Merriam-Webster:

: to investigate (someone) thoroughly to see if they should be approved or accepted for a job

: to check (something) carefully to make sure it is acceptable

Thank you for your comment!

seiyalove

February 4, 2015

I Iove to be a moderator for neotopia. I been on home for 2 to 3 years. I love help lots of people out and show them around. I am in eastern time zone in usa. I am on all the time but not when I am at work. I have a ps4 and is ready to get on neotopia. Hope I can be a moderator for neotopia.

Hiya Seiya, thank you for your offer! With the recent news that neotopia’s development has been halted, the moderation selection process has been put on hold. When/if it gets picked up again, it will be posted on our forums. Thank you again for your offer, we appreciate it!